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Some evidence suggests that a lack of TOM is not a core deficit in autism but there is no conclusive evidence yet as the usual tests have a ceiling corresponding to a mental age of 6 so although challenging for 6 year olds there are easy for adults

Happe tested adults and discovered they struggled with mental state sorties which included things like jokes, irony and white lies Baron-Cohen built on Happe's research

Research method

Quasi/natural experiment as IV was naturally occurring

DV - score out of 25 on the Eyes Task (measured by showing them 25 black and white standardised photos of the eye region and asking them to make a choice between 2 semantic opposite words to best describe the persons thoughts/feelings

Matched pairs as normal adults and TS adults were age-matched with the group of autism/AS participants

Participants tested in quiet room in their own home, the researchers' clinic or the researchers' lab at Cambridge University

Sample

Group 1 - 16 individuals with high-functioning autism/AS recruited through advert in National Autistic magazine

Group 2 - 50 normal age matched adults from general population of Cambridge

Group 3 - 10 adults with Tourette's syndrome also age matched with groups 1 and 2, recruited from tertiary referral centre in London

normal participants used as control group so that their scores could be compared with the autistic participants scores on TOM test

Tourette's participants used to compare with autism as both develop in childhood, both affect more males than females and both believed to affect same area of brain, if found differences in 2 groups would suggest problem with TOM specific to autism

Procedure

The Eyes Task, Strange stories task and 2 control tasks were presented to the participants in a random order (reduce order effects)

Gender recognition task involved identifying the gender in the photo this controlled for face perception.

Basic Emotion Task involved judging photos of whole faces displaying bsic emotions this was to check whether difficulties on the Eyes task were due to diffuclties with basic emotional recognition

The strange stories Task was used to validate the results from the Eyes Task

Key findings

Mean score for TS (20.4) not very different from normal adults (20.3) but both were significantly higher than the autism/AS score (16.3)

Normal females did a lot better than normal males on the Eyes task but normal males were significantly better than male autism/AS

Autism/AS group made significantly more errors on the Strange stories task than other groups

On Gender and Emotion control tasks no differences between groups

In autism/AS group no significant correlation between IQ and performance on Eyes Task

Conclusions

Adults with autism/AS do possess an impaired theory of mind

As some of the autism/AS group hold university degrees and were of normal intelligence suggest TOM deficits are independent of general intelligence